The Other Boleyn Girl. Philippa Gregory

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      At dinner the king hardly looked at me. The accident had thrown him into the melancholy that was such a characteristic of his father, which his courtiers too were learning to fear.

      The queen could not have been more pleasant and more entertaining. But no conversation, no charming smiles, no music could lift his spirits. He watched the antics of his Fool without laughing, he listened to the musicians and drank deep. The queen could do nothing to cheer him, because she was partly the cause of his ill-humour. He was looking at her as a woman near her change of life, he saw Death at her shoulder. She might live for a dozen years more, she might live for a score. Death was even now drying up her courses and putting the lines on her face. The queen was heading towards old age and she had made no heirs to follow them. They might joust and sing and dance and play all the day but if the king did not put a boy into Wales as prince then he had failed in his greatest, most fundamental duty to the kingdom. And a bastard on Bessie Blount would not do.

      ‘I am sure that Charles Brandon will soon be well again,’ the queen volunteered. There were sugared plums on the table and a rich sweet wine. She took a sip but I thought that she had little relish for it while her husband sat beside her with a face so drawn and dark that he could have been his father who had never liked her. ‘You must not feel that you did wrong, Henry. It was a fair joust. And you’ve taken hits from him before, God knows.’

      He turned in his chair and looked at her. She looked back at him and I saw the smile drain from her face at the coldness of his stare. She did not ask him what was the matter. She was too old and wise ever to ask an angry man what was troubling him. Instead, she smiled, a dauntless endearing smile, and she raised her glass to him.

      ‘Your health, Henry,’ she said with her warm accent. ‘Your health and I must thank God that it was not you that was hurt today. Before now, I have been the one running from the pavilion to the lists with my heart half broken with fear; and though I am sorry for your sister Queen Mary, I have to be glad that it was not you that was hurt today.’

      ‘Now that,’ Anne said in my ear, ‘that is masterly.’

      It worked. Henry, seduced by the thought of a woman sick with fear over his well-being, lost his dark sulky look. ‘I would never cause you a moment of uneasiness.’

      ‘My husband, you have caused me days and nights of them,’ Queen Katherine said, smiling. ‘But as long as you are well and happy, and as long as you come home at the end of it all; why should I complain?’

      ‘Aha,’ Anne said quietly. ‘And so she gives him permission and your sting is drawn.’

      ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.

      ‘Wake up,’ Anne said brutally. ‘Don’t you see? She’s called him out of his bad temper and she has told him that he can have you, as long as he comes home afterwards.’

      I watched him lift his glass in a return toast to her.

      ‘So what happens next?’ I asked. ‘Since you know everything?’

      ‘Oh he has you for a while,’ she said negligently. ‘But you won’t come between them. You won’t hold him. She’s old, I grant you. But she can act as if she adores him and he needs that. And when he was little more than a boy she was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. It’ll take a lot to overcome that. I doubt that you’re the woman to do it. You’re pretty enough and half in love with him, which is helpful, but I doubt that a woman such as you could command him.’

      ‘Who could do it?’ I demanded, stung by her dismissal of me. ‘You, I suppose?’

      She looked at the two of them as if she were a siege engineer measuring a wall. There was nothing in her face but curiosity and professional expertise. ‘I might,’ she said. ‘But it would be a difficult project.’

      ‘It’s me that he wants, not you,’ I reminded her. ‘He asked for my favour. He wore my kerchief under his breastplate.’

      ‘He dropped it and forgot it,’ Anne pointed out with her usual cruel accuracy. ‘And anyway, what he wants is not the issue. He’s greedy and he’s spoiled. He could be made to want almost anything. But you’ll never be able to do that.’

      ‘Why should I not do that?’ I demanded passionately. ‘What makes you think that you could hold him and I could not?’

      Anne looked at me with her perfectly beautiful face as lovely as if it were carved from ice. ‘Because the woman who manages him will be one who never stops for a moment remembering that she is there for strategy. You are all ready for the pleasures of bed and board. But the woman who manages Henry will know that her pleasure must be in managing his thoughts, every minute of the day. It would not be a marriage of sensual lust at all, though Henry would think that was what he was getting. It would be an affair of unending skill.’